Police forced to deal with mentally ill rather than fight crime

People are dying in police custody as officers are being forced to deal with
mental health patients and diverted from fighting crime, one of Britain’s
top police officers said.

Phillip Simelane is arrested by West Midlands Police on Harborne Road, Birmingham just hours after the murder of Christina EdkinsPhoto: NEWSTEAM

By Claire Carter

9:39AM BST 07 Oct 2013

Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said “tragedies occur” because police, who haven’t had the correct training, are called out to incidents involving mental health patients.

He said they needed to “fundamentally change” the way people with mental illness were dealt with, by working with the NHS and other agencies to ensure the best possible care for patients, as well as use of police time.

His comments follow the death of Christina Edkins, 16, who was stabbed by Philip Simelane, a paranoid schizophrenic, as she caught the bus to school earlier this year. He had been on the files of Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust for eight years but was freed from prison without an assessment or supervision just weeks before her death. Simelane pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was detained indefinitely.

Patients at the trust killed 13 people between 2010 and 2012 —the biggest number of homicides committed by patients of any local mental health trust in the country.

Sir Peter said there was a problem with the current way mental health patients are being dealt with and said this was one of the "biggest challenges" facing officers.

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He told Radio Four’s Today programme: “A vulnerable person is out there in the community and police officers are not trained to deal with them.

“We have quite a low threshold before we get involved. When we take that person to a mental health institution there’s a very high threshold as to whether they are admitted or not.

“Officers will often have to wait five or six hours.”

Sir Peter said a “huge amount” of money was wasted by agencies not working together properly, and said they needed to do more to work with the NHS. He said: “We need to move away from the Victorian belief that people with mental illness are bad.”

Britain’s mental health system has been criticised for failing to monitor patients properly who have then gone on to carry out random attacks and killings.

An investigation revealed 738 people were killed by patients with mental illness between 2001 and 2010, and each year ten of the killings were random. This figure has been decreasing since 2004.

Trusts have been criticised for making the same mistakes repeatedly, and not listening to families’ concerns.

Provisional figures for 2011, the most recent available and covered in a Manchester University study, suggest 46 people were killed by patients with mental illness.

Marjorie Wallace of mental health charity SANE told The Sun: “What is truly shocking and disappointing is that the same factors have been identified case after case. The same catalogue of blunders are happening, the same recommendations have been given. And yet the same tragedies are happening.

“The lack of provision of beds, together with the budget cuts means health care trusts are taking a gamble.”